Carswell’s defection: has UKIP had it?
“Douglas Carswell was once the golden boy of UKIP,” said Tim Stanley in The Sunday Telegraph: “its first elected MP, its brightest intellect, its shot at respectability.” In 2014, he defected from the Conservatives – triggering, and easily winning, a by-election in his Essex seat of Clacton. But last week, he left UKIP to sit as an independent MP (he said that he would not call a by-election, since he is not joining another party). “In hindsight, his resignation was inevitable from the very beginning.” Carswell was certainly a “passionate” Eurosceptic, but he wasn’t anti-immigration: he fought against UKIP’S more xenophobic tendencies. And his relations with Nigel Farage were strained from the start, when they fell out over Carswell’s refusal to claim a £650,000 parliamentary subsidy for UKIP. More recently, Carswell apparently refused to lobby for Farage’s longed-for knighthood. At any rate, Farage was pleased to see him go, tweeting: “Carswell has jumped before he was pushed. He was never UKIP and sought to undermine us.”
“That, then, is it for UKIP,” said John Rentoul in The Independent. “The referendum deprived it of its reason for being.” Farage’s last resignation – his third or fourth, depending on your definition – deprived it of its most charismatic personality. His successor Paul Nuttall’s defeat in the Stoke by-election last month suggested that it will not succeed in its aim of becoming “the antiLabour protest party of the North and Midlands”. Now Carswell’s defection has deprived it of its only MP. All that remains is for Britain to leave the EU in 2019 – which will see its MEPS out of a job. But UKIP is still a “potent” political force, said the Daily Express. It has released us “from the shackles of the EU”, and still represents a portion of the electorate that no other party speaks for; Nuttall has promised that he and his colleagues will act as “the guard dogs of Brexit” through the EU negotiations. UKIP is wounded, said The Independent, and it has struggled since the referendum. Farage’s immediate successor, Diane James, came and went in 18 days. Another leadership contender, Steven Woolfe, departed after a fist fight with a colleague in Strasbourg. Yet “it is too soon for its opponents to dance on its grave”. The party still averages 10% to 13% in the opinion polls. Whatever happens with Brexit, there “will probably always be room for an anti-immigration party in British politics”. With Carswell gone, “the Farage faction will be freer to push this option”.